• PDF / 383,977 Bytes
• 24 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
• 35 Downloads / 226 Views

DOWNLOAD

REPORT

---

Abstract Consciousness is not only a philosophical but also a technological issue, since a conscious agent has evolutionary advantages. Thus, to replicate a biological level of intelligence in a machine, concepts of machine consciousness have to be considered. The widespread internalistic assumption that humans do not experience the world as it is, but through an internal ‘3D virtual reality model’, hinders this construction. To overcome this obstacle for machine consciousness a new theoretical approach to consciousness is sketched between internalism and externalism to address the gap between experience and physical world. The ‘internal interpreter concept’ is replaced by a ‘key-lock approach’. Here, consciousness is not an image of the external world but the world itself. A possible technological design for a conscious machine is drafted taking advantage of an architecture exploiting self-development of new goals, intrinsic motivation, and situated cognition. The proposed cognitive architecture does not pretend to be conclusive or experimentally satisfying but rather forms the theoretical the first step to a full architecture model on which the authors currently work on, which will enable conscious agents e. g. for robotics or software applications. Keywords Consciousness · Machine Consciousness · Multi Agent System · Genetic Algorithms · Externalism

1 Introduction Even if consciousness is not exactly a ‘well-defined’ term and generations of philosophers and other scientists have discussed its complex features at length, there is a certain common understanding about its central meaning: Consciousness describes the unique capability of having experiences in terms of perceptions, thoughts, feelings R. Manzotti (B) Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] S. Jeschke IMA/ZLW & IfU, RWTH Aachen University, Dennewartstr. 27, 52068 Aachen, Germany Originally published in “International Journal of Advanced Research in Artificial Intelligence (IJARAI)”, © The Science and Information (SAI) Organization 2014. Reprint by Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42620-4_41

525

526

R. Manzotti and S. Jeschke

and awareness.1 Obviously, consciousness requires the awareness of the external world. What is still fairly mysterious is the nature of this experience. Although this capability is still very poorly understood and indeed is considered a sort of challenge for the standard picture of the world, it is a plain fact that the conscious human being is one of the outcomes of natural selection. Likewise, it seems undeniable that human beings cope with the most unexpected events by means of conscious reflection. Finally, they are extremely sensitive to anything remotely resembling the capability of feeling in other agents. In sum, consciousness appears to be a not negotiable aspect of a highly developed autonomous agents and it cannot be underestimated that the practical advantages may result from its replicatio